Five months after rescinding all awards in the Alliant 2 Small Business (A2SB) Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC), the General Services Administration issued proposed contract changes this week that would boost the number of awards by 40.
GSA originally made the awards in February, but returned to “pre-award status” as “corrective action” after a successful court challenge to the process by Citizant. In the March rescission notice, GSA said “proposal evaluation will continue and a new source selection decision is expected at a point to be determined” for the IT services acquisition vehicle.
The original wording of the contract process says, “The government anticipates that Multiple Awards shall be made up to a maximum of 80 awards. In the event of a precisely tied score at a number at the 80th position, all those Offerors will receive a Master Contract award.”
GSA’s draft revision to Amendment 9 raises both numbers to 120. The agency also added that “a pre-proposal webinar sponsored by the Government will be presented to interested parties, consisting of an RFP overview” to be offered on a to-be-announced date and time.
Proposals have been required to be in seven separate folders — “General; Relevant Experience; Past Performance; Systems, Certifications, and Clearances; Organizational Risk Assessment; Cost-Price; Responsibility” — but the new GSA draft removes the “responsibility” folder, and later adds a section stating offerors “may be contacted after proposal submission to supply to supply a completed GSA Form 527, Contractor Qualification and Financial Information as part of the Government’s responsibility determination.”
The section on proposed subcontractors, which said “the offeror and all proposed subcontractors must represent as small businesses for NAICS 541512 within SAM.GOV,” now adds, “This representation is based on the time of original offer submission for proposed subcontractors included in the initial proposal. For any new proposed subcontractors, this representation is based on the time of offer revision.”
GSA said the draft was presented Monday to existing offerors to gather comments and suggestions. “This draft amendment would require responses from existing offerors; no new offers would be accepted,” the agency said. Comments or suggestions may be submitted on the A2SB RFP Questions Template to [email protected] no later than Sept. 3.
“All input from offerors will be reviewed and considered by GSA; however, questions submitted may not be individually answered during this phase,” GSA said, adding, “The GSA A2SB Procuring Contracting Officer recommends that offerors DO NOT significantly invest their company resources, specifically ‘B&P Dollars,’ into developing proposal revisions in response to this draft amendment because (1) that is not the purpose of this draft, and (2) changes to this draft amendment may occur before the official Amendment 9 is released.”
